Catherine Theis

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Slashing Sounds, Catherine Theis' translation of the Italian poet Jolanda Insana (Chicago, 2024) is part of the Phoenix Poets Series. She is the author of the play MEDEA (Plays Inverse, 2017), the poetry collection The Fraud of Good Sleep (Salt Modern Poets, 2011), and the chapbook, The June Cuckold, a tragedy in verse (Convulsive, 2012). Along with editors Susan McCabe and Steven Minas, Theis edited The Sound of the Past: Modernist Echoes and Incantations, forthcoming from Vernon Press. Her contribution includes the essay, "What's Your Final Destination?: Place in Mirrlees, Eliot, and the Modernist Long Poem.” Her newest collection of poems, By a Roman, will be published by Antiphony Press in August 2025.

Theis has received various fellowships and awards, most notably from the Illinois Arts Council, Del Amo Foundation, Gold Family Foundation, and the Ugo Da Como Foundation. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, she holds a PhD in Literature and Creative Writing from the University of Southern California. Theis’ scholarly interests primarily focus on the intersection between translation, poetics, and performance studies. She teaches at the University of Southern California.

​Her work has been published in a collection of essays titled Classics in Modernist Translation (Bloomsbury, 2019), a volume that addresses modernist engagements with the literature of Greco-Roman antiquity. Her contribution, “Braving the elements: H.D.’s and Jeffers’ ‘transduction’ of Euripides,” explores the similarities between poets H.D. and Robinson Jeffers and their interest in the choral odes of Euripides’ The Bacchae. 

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